The information provided in this article is intended for those individuals who want to determine why a casting component failed to perform its intended purpose. It is also intended to provide insights for potential casting applications so that the likelihood of failure to perform the intended function is decreased. The article addresses factors that may cause failures in castings for each metal type, starting with gray iron and progressing to ductile iron, steel, aluminum, and copper-base alloys. It describes the general root causes of failure attributed to the casting material, production method, and/or design. The article also addresses conditions related to the casting process but not specific to any metal group, including misruns, pour shorts, broken cores, and foundry expertise. The discussion in each casting metal group includes factors concerning defects that can occur specific to the metal group and progress from melting to solidification, casting processing, and finally how the removal of the mold material can affect performance.

Aluminum and its alloys are highly corrosion resistant, protected by a self-healing oxide film that effectively passivates the underlying surface. This article examines the various processes by which the protective layer can be breached and the types of corrosion that can occur. It describes pitting, galvanic, and atmospheric corrosion as well as stress-corrosion cracking, corrosion fatigue, and erosion corrosion. It also covers intergranular, exfoliation, filiform, deposition, and crevice corrosion and special cases of corrosion in soils, seawater, and automotive coolant systems. The article provides an extensive amount of data as well as information on coatings, claddings, and cathodic protection methods; the effects of composition, microstructure, and surface treatments; and the compatibility of aluminum with food and various household and industrial chemicals.

Aluminum wrought products, castings, welds, and fasteners are used in many structural applications where they are required to safely support a load. It is useful to design aluminum structural components with its structural properties in mind from conceptualization rather than attempting to mimic components of other materials. This article discusses design specifications, design requirements and methods, and material properties used in aluminum structural design. These properties include tensile yield strength and tensile ultimate strength, welding, and ductility. The article describes various factors that affect the strength of two categories of aluminum structural components, namely members and connections. Design requirements for aluminum bolts, rivets, screws, and pins are provided. The article concludes with a discussion on the considerations for serviceability, namely deflections and vibrations.

Etching aluminum can be a pretreatment step for anodizing, chemical conversion coating, metal-to-rubber bonding, and a host of other processes. Chemical etching, using either alkaline or acid solutions, produces a matte finish on aluminum products. This article describes the alkaline etching and acid etching of aluminum. Alkaline etching reduces or eliminates surface scratches, nicks, extrusion die lines, and other imperfections. Acid etching can be done without heavy smut problems, particularly on aluminum die castings. Hydrochloric, hydrofluoric, nitric, phosphoric, chromic, and sulfuric acids are used in acid etching. The article presents a flow chart of the operations used in acid etching.

The sealing of the anodized aluminum is a critical process in achieving the durability and extended functionality of anodizing. This article discusses the different methods for sealing the anodic coatings produced by using sulfuric acid, namely, hot deionized water, hot nickel acetate, midtemperature, cold, and dichromate sealing. It reviews the factors that affect seal quality: immersion time, chemistry concentration, temperature, pH, water quality, coating thickness, and contaminants/dye bleeding. The article describes the various tests that are used for determining the quality of the seal, namely, salt spray, modified dye stain, acid dissolution, impedance, copper accelerated acetic acid salt spray, high-alkaline resistance, SO 2 fog, and clorox tests.

This article describes the Bayer process for the purification of alumina. The process includes four major stages: digestion, clarification, precipitation, and calcination. The article discusses the aluminum electrolytic process in terms of aluminum electrolysis cell design, magnetohydrodynamic forces, and cathode lining. It reviews the electrochemical reactions and thermodynamics for aluminum electrolysis standard Gibbs. The article also describes the cell operations and cell stability, as well as the key indicators of cell performance. It schematically illustrates the typical costs producing aluminum in an aluminum smelter. The article also discusses various environmental issues, such as fluoride recovery; perfluorocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and sulfur emissions; spent pot lining; and development of inert anodes and CO2 emissions.

Although laser stir welding (LSW) is applied to various metallic systems, it is especially appropriate to laser beam welding (LBW) of aluminum, because liquid aluminum possesses significantly less surface tension and viscosity than most common metal alloys, which results in greater fluidity of the molten pool. This article schematically illustrates the keyhole instability in LBW and describes the process details of LSW. Representative macrographs of butt, lap, and fillet welds produced using the LBW and LSW processes are presented. The article discusses the laser welding technologies having a large impact on the ability to apply LSW in production. It concludes with information on the industrial applications of LSW.

Aluminum possesses many characteristics that make it highly compatible with recycling. Production of aluminum from scrap has a number of advantages. This article discusses the technology for the recovery, sorting, and remelting of aluminum. It describes the collection and acquisition of aluminum scrap in transportation, packaging, electrical and electronic, and building and construction sectors. The article reviews the technologies used to accomplish comminution for aluminum: shearing, knife shredding, and swing-hammer shredding. It provides a description of the devices used in scrap sorting, such as hand sorting, air classification, magnetic separation, eddy-current separation, heavy-media separation, and sensor-based sorting. The article also describes thermal processing, refining and casting, and dross processing of aluminum. It provides information on reverberatory and electric furnaces used for melting aluminum.

This article presents a summary of aluminum temper designations, and applicable aluminum alloys and product forms for temper designations used in the United States (ANSI H35.1), Europe (EN 515), and internationally (ISO 2107).

This article discusses the properties of aluminum surface and the applications of aluminum alloys. It explains the effects of trace elements on aluminum alloys. The article considers microstructural development of aluminum in terms of the surface and explains how it will impact corrosion resistance and surface treatment. It describes the thermodynamics of equilibrium oxidation processes and non-equilibrium corrosion processes. The article provides a discussion on aluminum oxidation under atmospheric and dynamic conditions. It presents the potential/pH (Pourbaix) diagram for aluminum under atmospheric and dynamic conditions. The article also explains the polarization effects during the formation of stable aluminum oxide under dynamic conditions. It concludes with information on the designation system for aluminum finishes.

The necessary precursor to a proper and durable finish is the preparation of the active aluminum surface to receive the desired protective finish that will allow it to have a long and attractive service life. This article helps those who work with aluminum in the many varieties of applications of such products. It describes the two main categories of cleaning that can be used with most any metal, namely, mechanical cleaning and chemical cleaning. The article provides a discussion on the laboratory evaluation of cleaners, field testing of cleaners, and cleaner types and procedures. It also describes the special cleaning procedures for aluminum alloys, such as steam cleaning and rotary wire-brush cleaning. The article reviews the use of temporary coatings and the use of maintenance coatings on aluminum. It provides information on the handling and storage procedures of aluminum alloys and the cleaning of specific applications of aluminum.

This article describes manufacturing procedures that produce aluminum foams and have since become industrially important and successful. It discusses the foaming of melts by blowing agents and foaming of melts by gas injection. The article focuses on aluminum foams based on the Foaminal technology, because those foams dominate the technical applications of aluminum foams. It also discusses the mechanical properties of metal foams, such as general compression behavior, elastic behavior, strain-rate sensitivity, tensile behavior, ductility, fatigue, and mechanical damping. The article concludes with information on the applications of highly porous metal structures.

This article compares and contrasts mechanical joining techniques used in the manufacture of aluminum assemblies, including seaming, swaging, flanging, crimping, clinching, dimpling, interference and snap fits, and interlocking joints. It provides basic illustrations of the various methods and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of each. The article also discusses the use of staples, nails, rivets, and threaded fasteners and provides relevant property and performance data.

This article focuses on a variety of laser beam machining (LBM) operations of aluminum and its alloys, namely, laser cutting, laser drilling, laser milling, laser turning, laser grooving, laser scribing, laser marking, and laser micromachining. It presents different approaches for carrying out machining operations, laser processing parameters, efficiency and accuracy of the process, and the effect of laser processing parameters on the quality of the machined surface. The article provides an overview of the various conventional (chip forming) and nonconventional machining techniques employed for aluminum-based materials. A comparison of the various aspects of LBM with other non-conventional techniques is also presented. The article also describes the features of LBM techniques employed for aluminum and its alloys for different types of machining.

Chemical brightening (bright dipping) and electrolytic brightening (electropolishing) are essentially selective-dissolution processes, in which the high points of a rough surface of aluminum are attacked more rapidly than the depressions, and the peaks and valleys are smoothed to produce a bright and beautiful finish. This article discusses the metallurgical factors, optical factors, and applications of the chemical and electrolytic brightening. It compares the chemical brightening and electrolytic brightening, and presents the advantages of the chemical and electrolytic brightening processes in terms of performance and economy. The article describes the phosphoric-nitric acid baths and phosphoric-sulfuric acid baths used for chemical brightening. Solution compositions and operating conditions for three commercial electropolishing processes, as well as for suitable post-treatments, are presented in a table.

Mechanical finishes usually can be applied to aluminum using the same equipment used for other metals. This article describes the two types of grinding used in mechanical finishing: abrasive belt grinding and abrasive wheel grinding. It reviews the binders and fluid carriers used in buffing, and discusses satin finishing and barrel finishing. It also describes lapping and honing techniques that are of special interest in treating aluminum parts that have received hard anodic coatings. Honing recommendations for aluminum alloys are presented in a table.

This article describes the methods used for coloring anodized aluminum coatings: integral coloring, electrolytic coloring, chemical coloring, and organic dyeing. It discusses organic dye chemistry in terms of single-component organic dyes and multicomponent dyes. The article reviews optimal dyeing conditions, such as temperature, time, concentration, and pH. It concludes with a discussion on the factors considered for choosing a coloring method: the desired shade, light fastness, heat fastness, and contamination.

This article discusses two basic forms of extrusion: cold and hot. It provides information on three types of extrusion processes, namely, direct extrusion, reverse extrusion, and hydrostatic extrusion. The article also discusses the mechanics, analysis, tooling and die design of extrusion as well as thermodynamics. The finite-element method suitable for simulation of metal forming processes is explained. The article examines the extrusion defects that are divided into three different categories including surface, subsurface, and internal type. It includes information on friction and lubrication modeling of extrusion processes. The article also discusses the fundamentals of extrusion technology of titanium alloys and aluminum. It concludes with information on two forms of wear in extrusion, namely, adhesive and abrasive wear.

Modeling of gas evolution during sand mold castings is one of the most important technical and environmental issues facing the metal casting industry. This article focuses on describing the capability of numerically predicting gas evolution for the furan binder/silica sand system. It illustrates numerical modeling to study the gas evolution from furan binder/silica sand mold aggregate for aluminum, cast iron, and steel alloy cast components. The article discusses simulation results and experimental validation for aluminum alloys, cast iron castings, and steel alloys, as well as a parametric study that investigated the effects of various variables. It concludes with information on the application of 3-D modeling methodology to investigate gas emissions in furan binder/silica sand castings for steel 4140 and aluminum A356 alloys.